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Category Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

“So what is the problem? If it’s not a problem for $21 trillion to go missing from DOD and HUD, and, [if] it’s possible [for the government] to come up with more than $20[plus] trillion to give or loan to the banks [in a bailout] — when there is no legal obligation to do so, and, when we [the government] can transfer trillions of the most valuable technology in the world to private corporations at zero cost to them and [at] great cost to the taxpayers, [then] I assure you that fixing whatever pension fund problem there is, is not difficult. However, the political will must exist and want to. That is the problem.”

“If we can print money to give $20 trillion [plus] to the banks, and, [if we can] let $21 trillion go missing from the federal government, [then] why is it a problem to print $5 trillion to fund the pension funds?”

Failing pension funds are on the hook for $5 trillion (see also this short article from 2010), and the federal government has no answer? Well, that is a supreme con job, because, as Fitts points out, the government is playing far larger money games without a shred of concern.

And this is just the beginning of the rabbit hole Fitts has been traveling for the past several decades. Here is her basic position: Prosperity for the many, not the few, is eminently possible and doable.

The only thing the bureaucratic resistance hates more than President Trump is the disclosure of their own salaries. It’s a classic case of the bureaucracy protecting the bureaucracy, underscoring the resistance faced by the new administration.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information.

We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016).
68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.
$20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.
A 7,360 percent increase in opacity hides one out of every five federal salaries.

Kiryas Joel (Yiddish: קרית יואל‎‎, Kiryas Yoyel, Yiddish pronunciation: [ˈkɪʁ.jəs ˈjɔɪ.əl], often locally abbreviated as KJ) is a village within the town of Monroe in Orange County, New York, United States. The majority of its residents are Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews who belong to the worldwide Satmar Hasidic sect.

Kiryas Joel is part of the Poughkeepsie–Newburgh– Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area as well as the larger New York–Newark–Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Kiryas Joel has by far the youngest median age population of any municipality in the United States,[2] and the youngest, at 13.2 years old, of any population center of over 5,000 residents in the United States.[3] Residents of Kiryas Joel, like those of other Haredi Jewish communities, typically have large families, and this has driven rapid population growth.[4]

According to 2008 census figures, the village has the highest poverty rate in the nation. More than two-thirds of residents live below the federal poverty line and 40% receive food stamps.

If you can’t understand the minimum wage, you should be denied political power and treated like a cute but dangerous child when it comes to economic matters.

Whether a person can understanding the minimum wage should be a fundamental test. Can they distinguish between short term and long term? Can they distinguish between how the world is and how they want it to be?

The explanations by Hazlitt, Friedman and many others are so crystal clear.

Originally, the point of the left was fighting poverty. The argument went that Communism produced more wealth because it removed the inefficiency (greed) of those who owned the means of production. Communism was superior because it produced MORE WEALTH. Nobel prize winning economist Paul Samuelson told everyone this was inevitable.

All those scores of millions of people were murdered in the name of helping the poor. (Paul Samuelson, that degenerate monster, posited the question of whether communist wealth did not make its oppression worth it.)

Then, in the parts of the world where people had defended themselves against the communists and kept the snarling horde at bay, CAPITALISM created never-before-seen wealth. Capitalism ended poverty.

Capitalism delivered the promise of early communism’s most starry-eyed proselytizers.

As I like to say: The Messiah of the left has arrived, but the left has no need for a messiah that actually shows up.

The left abandoned their fight against poverty and forgot that it ever existed. They’ve anointed a new messiah, one that is guaranteed to never arrive and ruin their bloodlust for destroying social orders: equality.

The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and A2, are highly skilled—if they are assigned to either task they are guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2, are less skilled—specifically, for either task each has a 50% probability of breaking the vase.

Now suppose you are worker A1. If you team up with A2, you produce a vase every attempt. However, if you team up with B1 or B2, then only 50% of your attempts will produce a vase. Thus, your productivity is higher when you team up with A2 than with one of the B workers. Something similar happens with the B workers. They are more productive when they are paired with an A worker than with a fellow B worker.

So far, everything I’ve said is probably pretty intuitive. But here’s what’s not so intuitive. Suppose you’re the manager of the vase company and you want to produce as many vases as possible. Are you better off by (i) pairing A1 with A2 and B1 with B2, or (ii) pairing A1 with one of the B workers and A2 with the other B worker?

If you do the math, it’s clear that the first strategy works best. Here, the team with two A workers produces a vase with 100% probability, and the team with the two B workers produces a vase with 25% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces 1.25 vases per time period. With the second strategy, both teams produce a vase with 50% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces only one vase per time period.

The example illustrates how workers’ productivity is often interdependent—specifically, how your own productivity increases when your co-workers are skilled.

The arguments are so obvious, the evidence is so overwhelming. The leftist program so disastrous to the very people in whose name it is promoted. What do leftists think when they hear an interview like this? I can’t imagine. I really can’t.

Today I was invited to a US college class to speak about the view on the family in Sweden. I started by talking about Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the architects behind the Swedish welfare state, free schools, free healthcare and their wonderful underlying social fascist ideals. Spiced it up with a few quotes from their famous book, such as

“The task of prophylactic social policy is to create a better human material and improve the quality of the population stock.”

“Most important is obviously the radical cleansing out of individuals highly unfit for life, which can be achieved by sterilization.”

“Schools must be used as propaganda tools: not only to create more knowledgeable and responsible parents in the next generation, which is important in itself, but also to let children raise up their own parents, a method which has proven effective.”

When I finally explained that home schooling was a criminal offence which can be rewarded with prison time and forced adoption of the children, they looked at me in horror.

I was pleased to see them so quickly cured of their socialist collectivist illusions of the happy welfare state. The students even asked me to come back and spend more time with them.